From busts of Karl Marx to paintings glorifying the "Heroes of Socialist Labour", this communist art in a rundown building formerly used to store animal feed arouses little interest in today's Germany.

One enormous picture among the many catches the eye -- it shows Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader, posing with long-term leader Erich

Honecker on East Germany's 40th anniversary.

Several weeks after the meeting, the Berlin Wall would fall and communism be swept away in eastern and central Europe.

"Very poor quality," comments Kristina Geisler of the Beeskow art archives in charge of the collection, amid the 1,500 paintings and myriad propaganda objects crammed, floor to ceiling, over three floors.

Dismissive of socialist kitsch, the art historian chooses to focus instead on the East German artists who managed to find a creative space somewhere between artistic freedom and the constraints of dictatorship.

"We also have here works of great artistic quality," said Ilona Weser, who heads the archive.

To illustrate her point, she opens one of the drawers holding 13,000 graphic paintings by Bernhard Heisig, a major artist from the communist era renowned both in the former East and West Germany.

Works by many other figures of socialist realism are also stored in Beeskow, a quiet town southwest of the German capital. Some are covered in bubble wrap while others just lie on the linoleum floor.

Nearly 2,000 drawings, 1,300 photos, 4,000 medals and 300 busts lie in the space filled with the din of a dilapidated air-conditioning system.

Artworks such as "Celebration of Miners", "Industrial Landscape" and "Album on the History of the Soviet Army" once adorned the walls of Houses of Culture and offices of the National People's Army or the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

When these vestiges of the party's 1949-1989 grip on power vanished with the fall of the Wall, East Germany's last culture minister managed to save some of the artworks shortly before national reunification in 1990.

Anchored in a political ideology now consigned to the history books of Europe, they were stored in Beeskow and quickly forgotten.

"Art played a particular role in" East Germany, said Geisler. "It was not just about decorating the walls. The art reflected the evolution of society and is today a historical source."

Jürgen Danyel, deputy director of the ZZF institute of historical research of Potsdam, has been trying for three years to draw up an inventory of the East German artworks with the help of other cultural bodies.

"Art acts like a seismograph and makes visible the erosion of communist power in the 1980s, for example," he said.

However, nobody seems especially interested in this heritage. At the end of last year, the European Union turned down a request for funding to renovate and modify the warehouse.

Thus, at the end of her workday, Geisler takes one of the big keys she carries and closes up the building, leaving a large gold-framed painting of Lenin, a gift to the GDR from Czechoslovakia, to gather dust in the stairwell.

While I'm sure a lot of this art is pretty terrible, I'd like to see it exhibited somewhere. It's not like the West produced such objects of beauty. Hell, I remember how any Pferdemist in West Berlin was automatically neo-something or other while anything produced in the DDR was automatically propaganda. Socialist Realism is probably one of the most underrated art forms of all time. Probably because it required the artist to have actual talent and be able to paint something.

I bet if the exhibited the worst of this stuff in Tacheles or Prenzlauer Berg, it would look like Rembrandt next to that awful hipster kitch.

This is all part of German culture whether people like it or not, just like the Berlin Wall. Germans rushed to demolish the wall because of what it was used for, but they also destroyed a huge tourist attraction and a reminder of their unique history.

Not everything from a troubled time is propaganda. Art was and always has been a form of expressing yourself and to all of those who say we should burn it, what is /your/ sense of art? What do you believe is real art? Is it only the things you like to see? Propaganda is something used to sway peoples opinions to support one side against another, is that really was this art does to people now. Am I going to see it and suddenly become a communist? Do not let this wonderful and remarkable warehouse full of history die with the place it came from. Sure the past has had it's ups and downs but we don't forget it because we simply want to. We learn from it and prevent things like that in the future. Do you know why we have so many holocaust museums in the world? So we can learn from them! Prevent any futures that are like that. This art may be a controversial subject but it is something that we must keep.

Preserve it in some dusty warehouse. We do not have the eyes our grandchildren will have. No matter how difficult it is for us to understand, a century from now people will see this as the art of the time, and may even like it. Bach went out of fashion and was forgotten. Mendelssohn only rediscovered him decades later.

I have the collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters published by Taschen. They are so bad, they're good!

I grew up in 50's America. We eventually discarded all our household furnishings as junk. Today, they have been rechristened "Midcentury Modern", and I can't afford to buy them back. The people buying it are an age that never lived with it.

The Nazi art was confiscated by the American army and is in storage in the USA. It ought to be exhibited along with the East German stuff as it all would provide some insights into totalitarian culture. A grand exhibit outside Germany might be best, though, given the sensitivities involved. Let's have it in Switzerland.

Police in Bremen said that the risk of a terrorist attack had been reduced in the city after they arrested two suspected arms dealers. The city remains under high alert, with special protection for the Jewish community.
READ

An estimated 375 people turned out for the Germany-based PEGIDA movement's first demonstration in Britain on Saturday, but were outnumbered by a 2,000-strong crowd of counter-protesters, police said.
READ

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared the killing of three government troops by pro Moscow rebels a "serious breach of the ceasefire", during a telephone call Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her office said.
READ

Germany's highest civil court ruled in favour of a man who swapped the carpet in his new apartment for parquet flooring, incurring the wrath of the retired couple who lived below him over his loud footsteps.
READ

Teachers all over the country are expected to stike starting Monday, German education trade union GEW said, after negotiations with the wage commission of the federal states (TdL) failed to achieve results.
READ

Andre Shepherd at the European Court of Justice in June 2014. Photo: DPA

American soldier Andre Shepherd, who applied for asylum in Germany as a conscientious objector against the war in Iraq after going AWOL from his unit, saw a judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) go against him on Thursday.
READ